


will to live

by lutzaussi



Category: Naruto
Genre: ANBU Sakura, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic, Established Relationship, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 23:56:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9096187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lutzaussi/pseuds/lutzaussi
Summary: Sakura joins the ANBU. The entire world seems a little tilted after that, but they all adapt.





	

When Sakura becomes a jounin, there is no ceremony like the one for Neji or Shino, because after her elevation she is immediately inducted into the ANBU and sent with a search and rescue team on a retrieval mission.

In the end she’s almost thankful that there is no pomp and she can immediately get to work learning the ropes, but the rabbit mask does not come with a owner’s manual and she fumbles a little. By the third mission she knows roughly her duties--stay back, keep focused if anyone is injured, be the first to get to the injured and cover them, things like that. She’s the lowest in the pecking order, but that suits her just fine.

Nobody starts at the top.

She reminds herself of that on every mission, every life that she has to take, every broken bone she has to heal. The killing isn’t what’s hard, and neither is the healing. Sakura has seen enough of both that they don’t bother her. But there’s something about the pace and never-ending attitude, and after her fifth mission Sakura feels like she’s going to burn out if she continues at the pace she is going.

They are let off for three days, on call if one of the other teams gets in trouble, and the first place Sakura goes is her apartment. Her cactus has managed to die, there’s a thin layer of dust on her bed, and all of the food she had in the fridge has gone bad. After cleaning out the fridge and her bed, she sleeps, and when she wakes up it is the morning, and she eats a ration bar before heading out.

She does as she suspects Naruto has done a couple times since he returned, focuses her mind on the window of Kakashi-sensei’s living room, flickers so she lands on the narrow sill and doesn’t fall. But! Unlike Naruto she bears a gift, namely some high-quality green tea that Kakashi was complaining about them drinking the last of the last time he had the two of them over for dinner.

He’s in the kitchen and he takes his time getting to the window to unlock it and let her in, accepts the tea with a snort and returns to the kitchen. She follows, sits at the table.

“On call?” he asks, and Sakura blearily realizes that she hasn’t changed out of her black uniform pants and shirt, the most she did was take of her arm-armor and put on an oversized pink cardigan.

“Yep,” Sakura pulls her legs up to her chest, accepts the mug of lemon-infused tea that he hands her before he leans back against the stove with his own mug.

“Search and rescue one?” he asks.

“Yep, field medic.”

“Rabbit?” and even though he has his mask up she can tell he is smiling, just a little.

“They call me the ‘battering ram’,” Sakura says, blushing a little when Kakashi’s smile touches his eye.

“Appropriate,” he says, tugs his mask down so he can sip his tea, “S’n’r one is a good squad, always has been.”

“How am I,” she struggles to form a coherent sentence, “supposed to survive this?”

Kakashi gets that, though, considers his tea, “Sleep when you can, where you can. Eat whenever you get the chance, even if it’s only five minutes.  _ Don’t _ ever go drinking, unless the Hokage herself gives you a vacation, and even then there are emergencies.”

Sakura sips her tea, nods at every point he makes and files them away for further consideration and memorization.

“And consider getting a roommate,” he adds after a pause, a thoughtful look on his face, “Gai and I were roommates when I was ANBU, and I never had to worry about food going bad or my plants dying.”

And he has over a dozen of them on every surface imaginable, so Sakura imagines that was a big problem for him. But--

“You roomed with Gai?” she asks, and maybe her voice is a little aghast, because she can’t imagine it at  _ all _ .

“There’s a reason I can barely tolerate his presence for more than a couple hours,” Kakashi says, looking blankly off into the distance, a look that is very telling.

Sakura lets herself out a little after that, mulling over her teacher's advice. She knows that she hasn’t been sleeping enough, but she also knows that she hasn’t had the goddamn chance to. Maybe if she sleeps standing  _ up _ .

She stops by the store, buys only enough food to last for a couple days before heading back to her empty, dusty apartment.

Ino is at the door to her apartment, a bag over her shoulder and an immensely irritated look on her face. “Oi, Sakura!” she yells when she notices her, and Sakura curses her luck, or lack thereof.

“Hey, Ino,” Sakura finds her key in her pocket, stops in front of the other young woman. Ino--she doesn’t know why Ino is standing outside of her apartment, but from the look on her face, Ino means business.

Sakura lets them inside, and as soon as their shoes are off Ino slams her bag down on the couch, rifles through it.

“Well, I got you a birthday present, but you were  _ gone _ ,” she says.

Sakura realizes, very abruptly, that she is now nineteen.

Ino shoves a haphazardly wrapped package into her hands, “Naruto and Hinata went in on it with me, and Naruto insisted on wrapping it.”

Sakura spares Ino a quizzical glance before opening the gift. A cowl--one that she will be able to fit under her mask--and inside of the cowl a whole assortment of nail polish. But it isn’t any old nail polish, it’s the expensive stuff that Suzume makes with jellyfish poison in it, not harmful unless it touches open wounds. There’s at least six bottles of it, and Sakura looks up from them to Ino, unable to form a coherent, sincere thank you quickly.

“Don’t look at me like that, I didn’t blow a whole lot of money,” Ino says, “But, well, they’re useful, so it shouldn’t matter.”

Sakura carefully sets the unpacked gift aside, and pulls Ino into a tight hug. After a moment the other girl’s arms come up around her, and her voice is small when she says, “I fucking worry about you.”

That reminds Sakura of her talk with Kakashi, and she makes up her mind. “Hey, Ino, do you want to move in together?”

Ino holds her at arm's length and looks her over, absolutely confused, “What?”

Sakura sighs and shrugs, says, “The food in my fridge always goes bad and my cactus died.”

“How the hell did you manage to kill--yes, oh my god,” Ino hugs her again, “yes, let’s get a goddamn apartment.”

The apartment they move into is old-fashioned, with tatami in the main room and the kitchen, no bed but a wide futon, and a fully-tiled bathroom with a central drain and a deep bathtub. It’s small, yes, but there are just two of them, and neither of them have a whole lot of material things.

Ino has her plants, and Sakura has a collection of porcelain maneki-neko, but other than that it is their clothing and ninja gear that they bring with them.

Sakura doesn’t get a whole lot of time to enjoy the new apartment or Ino, because search and rescue team one is sent out on back-to-back missions for nearly two months, outside of Konoha and outside of the Land of Fire. The last mission sees them lose on of their own on the border of the Land of Earth, and a loss on a search and rescue team means that they will have at least two days of a break, the time needed to replace the fallen nin.

The first thing that Sakura does when they are allowed to go home is wash herself so she can take a bath. But she runs into a problem, because there is too much sap stuck in her hair to wash out, and, anyway, she can’t even  _ reach _ all of the twigs and debris.

She props the door open with one hip, bellows, “Ino!”

The other woman glares at her from the kitchen, the kettle in one hand and a knife in the other, “What.”

“Could you help me with something? Please?”

Ino’s face softens, and she puts the knife and the kettle down, trots back to the bathroom. “What do you ne--oh my god, your  _ hair _ ,” she breathes when Sakura turns, not bothering to cover herself with a towel.

“Could you,” Sakura pauses, tries to gauge how bad her hair is by the expression on Ino’s face, “try?”

Ino touches her hair. “I think,” her voice is delicate, “I might need to get some scissors.”

Sakura hangs her head over a bucket while Ino all but shears her hair, her hands over her face. While her bangs are relatively untouched by the mess of sap and twigs and foliage, with the rest of her head cut shorter than even Naruto’s hair their length looks odd, so it is with a heavy heart that Sakura tells Ino to cut her bangs off.

Ino has to take her clothes off because all of the sap and hair that transferred over to the front of her shirt and pants, and she sits Sakura on the floor, taking the stool for herself so she can sit behind the other woman and soap up her hair. “You know,” Ino says, once Sakura’s hair is clean and her hair is clean and they’re sitting in the tub together, “you and Naruto match now.”

Sakura rolls her eyes, runs a hand through her too-short hair, and slips down in the tub a little farther, “Come on, his hair is longer than mine now.”

“Hah! Oh, you haven’t seen him since he got back from his mission with Kakashi, have you!” Ino cackles, moves so they’re pressed shoulder to shoulder, “apparently his hair caught fire when they were fighting a missing-nin, it’s really short now. He had to beg Hinata to trim it so it would be even.”

Sakura chuckles at that, lets her head rest on Ino’s shoulder. “We should all go out to dinner,” she says quietly, after a beat. “I haven’t seen Hinata in months.”

Ino hums in agreement, lets her head rest atop Sakura’s.

They meet up with Hinata and Naruto the next evening outside of the barbecue place. Shikamaru and a few of the others are already inside, but once Naruto and Sakura see each other they devolve into laughter that lasts for several minutes. After that diversion, Sakura pulls first Naruto then Hinata into bear hugs, and they go inside the restaurant to eat and enjoy each other's’ company.

All good things must come to an end, and after Ino leaves on a mission with Shikamaru and Choji the next day, the  _ next  _ morning Sakura is called away on a mission.

She’s all geared up and ready to go until she realizes that Ino won’t know that she’s on a mission. Muttering curses under her breath as she’s already on her way to her team’s typical rendez-vous point, she stops by the nearest apartment that she knows. Kakashi’s.

He’s up, even if Iruka is asleep in his bedroom, and she slips off her mask and taps the window until he sluggishly walks over to open it.

“Sakur--” he stops, does a double-take and stares at her head when she drops into the room, “Your hair?”

“Hello, sensei,” she says a little loudly, “will you be able to tell Ino that I’m on a mission?”

“In--hair?”

“Aagh!” she takes her teacher by his shoulders, shaking him as she says, “Yes, my hair is gone! I don’t care! I just need someone to tell Ino that I’m on a mission when she gets back today!”

Iruka walks out of the bedroom wearing one of Kakashi’s shirts and his own pants, stops when he sees them. “Sakura,” he says, padding over to them and prying her hands off of Kakashi, tugging her into a warm hug that makes her feel safer than she has felt in years, “a mission?”

“Yes,” Sakura pulls back, hops back on the windowsill, slips the rabbit mask on, “Thanks, Kakashi-sensei!”

Iruka slips an arm around Kakashi, and they both wave as she leaves.

Kirigakure in winter is a land of ice and snow and sleet, but when they get back after two weeks Konoha is likewise a land of ice and snow, though without the sleet. They are sent south, though, where there is no snow but a lot of rain, and Sakura is glad for her experience with poisons because they encounter many.

The new year starts while they are away, but very little in Konoha feels like it has changed, when they return. Ino has a bouquet of red and white camellias on the small table in the kitchen and there is curry cooking on the stove when Sakura gets back, her legs covered in dried mud and blood.

Ino is sitting on the couch under a blanket, frowning at a pile of papers that are clipped together on her lap. She brightens when Sakura appears, tips her head up so Sakura can give her a kiss.

“Work?” Sakura asks, stripping off her armguards and flak jacket.

“I’m going to be a parent,” Ino says, putting the papers down and getting up to pick up the articles of clothing that Sakura is shedding on her way back to the bathroom, “of a genin team, anyway.”

“A genin team?” Sakura looks up from starting bathwater and filling the wooden bucket so she can clean herself.

“It was me or Shikamaru, and no offense to him, but Shikamaru would be a terrible jounin teacher,” Ino says, dumping the assembled clothes into the hamper and going to put Sakura’s ANBU gear in their room.

Once Sakura is clean and clothed in similarly clean clothes, they eat the curry, and before long they end up in bed, both ready to sleep despite the relatively early hour. Sakura wakes up in the middle of the night, Ino a solid presence at her back, when there’s a tapping on the window. Ino whines when Sakura slips out of the bed and pulls her clothes and gear on, stretches a hand out to where Sakura is making as little noise as possible.

“If I can I’ll stop by and tell you how long,” Sakura says, kneeling next to the bed and letting Ino wrap her arms around her, leaves her mask off so they can share a quick kiss.

“Com’ back safe,” Ino says, scooting over to the spot Sakura had vacated and pulling the quilt tighter around her. She mutters, as Sakura is slipping past the curtains into the night, “I love you.”

And Sakura smiles, closes the window, and departs.


End file.
